The Best 3-D of 2014

by Vanessa Tottle & Gabriel Valdez

Making movies in 3-D is still more of a science than an art. Most films get the basics done and nothing more: create a few planes of depth for characters to exist on; poke the audience in the eye with something during an action scene; and if you’re post-converting, blur the detail out of anything in the background in a horrific attempt to emulate depth-of-field.

The best 3-D is native, meaning it’s filmed as 3-D instead of being filmed in 2-D and converted later. Native 3-D retains detail and movement qualities that post-converted 3-D does not. When offered a post-converted 3-D film, the 2-D version may actually be more visually impressive.

When we talk about the best 3-D of 2014, we are talking about the visual fidelity – how realistic it looks – but we’re also talking about its artistic use. How much does it contribute to the story and the visuals. 3-D is still new enough that no one’s yet to establish its visual language. There are very few “new shots” that only 3-D can accomplish, and there’s no one pushing 3-D visual language the way Orson Welles once pushed deep focus cinematography.

Alfonso Cuaron’s Gravity did this in 2013 by fusing its 3-D, visual effects, and POV sequences together, but this had more to do with cinematographer Emmanuel Lubezki’s already established language of the edited long take than with anything extraordinarily new.

Martin Scorsese is the director who’s come closest to writing new cinematographic language using 3-D. In 2011’s Hugo, he treats his scenes as if they’re taking place in dioramas. He resurrects long-forgotten silent film techniques and develops 3-D analogues, most notably replacing the vignette (when characters’ faces are overlit and the corners of the frame darkened) with a 3-D protrusion (when characters’ faces lean unnaturally close to the viewer and the corners of the frame are softened).

Unfortunately, there’s nothing in 2014 that comes close to these two examples. The best 3-D belongs to one film alone, but there are three that stand out:

HOW TO TRAIN YOUR DRAGON 2

Animation can take advantage of 3-D in two ways. Firstly, it’s easier to convert and play around with on a computer, since the animation isn’t live action. Adjustments can be made to the actors themselves in order to take advantage of 3-D, before a scene is even finalized. Secondly, the audience is already practicing a visual suspension of disbelief because they’re watching a stylized cartoon. Animations need to do more than just use 3-D to add depth then, and How to Train Your Dragon 2 creates some iconic and mythological moments. That half the film takes place flying through the sky certainly doesn’t hurt 3-D’s ability to play off of our depth perception and kneejerk panic reaction when we’re suddenly dropping through clouds.

(Read Gabe’s review)

EDGE OF TOMORROW

Edge of Tomorrow, also known as Live. Die. Repeat., makes excellent use of 3-D, especially in its action scenes. It uses all the gimmicky tricks – throwing dirt in your face during a battle scene, having objects speed toward you – but this all plays into the movie’s throwback sense of what action should be. The techniques aren’t abused and there’s enough creative use of 3-D, especially in terms of background and edge-of-frame action, to not have to rely on gimmicks.

(Read Gabe’s review)

EXODUS: GODS AND KINGS

Here’s your winner. There’s only one film that really did something brand new with 3-D this year, and that’s Exodus: Gods and Kings. The movie itself is taxing, overlong, and ultimately pointless, but the 3-D is sumptuous. As Moses treads through the desert, sand kicks up and – rather than flying in your face – it shimmers in the evening sun as it drifts back down to the ground. The waters of the Red Sea glitter along the horizon. As the shadow of death falls across Egypt, it travels at unavoidable speed, yet the vastness of the landscape means it still takes its time. This creates a truly visual sense of creeping, impending doom while still giving it the feeling of weight and force.

Whatever other mistakes Ridley Scott made in directing Exodus – and there are many – the 3-D is a resounding success. He uses it to create gorgeous details, especially in the foreground, where filmmakers are often too nervous to place much 3-D.

There are more traditional uses of 3-D in the film, too: crocodiles eating people, teeming hordes of insects and frogs, rock slides, the kind of pomp we’d expect. This is all done well, but it’s really how the 3-D is used in the film’s most quiet and transitional moments that evokes a sense of place and makes us wish the whole film had been about the people and the setting instead of the mythology and the melodrama.

(Read Gabe’s review)

It’s admittedly thin pickings for truly exceptional 3-D this year. The technique isn’t always as solid a selling point at the box office as producers anticipate. As we’ve seen with Interstellar, some major directors just don’t want to accommodate it. Until a pioneering director really starts to create a visual language unique to 3-D, the popularity of the technique will continue to ebb and flow without really taking hold.

Enough viewers also become uncomfortable, nauseous, or develop headaches because of 3-D, that it will take a major technological leap before it threatens to become our primary way of watching movies. If you do experience a negative physical reaction to 3-D, listen to your body. 3-D tricks your brain into interpreting depth on what is still a 2-D surface. People are built differently, and not everyone’s brain is built to cope with 3-D. In very rare cases, it can have adverse effects. If you don’t like 3-D, there’s nothing wrong with you. It’s still a rudimentary technique at this stage, and rudimentary techniques are rarely suited to all.

In the lead-up to the Oscars, we’ve named several other Best of 2014 Awards. These include:

The Best Diversity of 2014

The Best Original Score of 2014

The Best Soundtrack of 2014

The Most Thankless Role of 2014

The Half-Year Awards for Film — The Final Tally

Last week, I listed the most outstanding performers, writers, directors, and designers we’ve seen in film so far this year. Consider it a sort of six-months-in Oscars. This is a recap and a final tally – click on the links themselves to read the reasoning behind each decision. These aren’t Oscar predictions, they’re one critic’s opinions on the best we’ve seen in film this year.

First, we ran the technical and design awards:

Best Sound Design
Johnnie Burn, Under the Skin
Best Musical Score
Mica Levi, Under the Skin
Best Art Direction
The Raid 2
Best Make-up
Kumalasari Tanara, The Raid 2
Best Stunts
Yayan Ruhian, Iko Uwais, Bruce Law, The Raid 2
Best Costume Design
Michael Wilkinson, Noah
Best Visual Effects
Industrial Light & Magic, Noah
Best 3-D
Edge of Tomorrow
Best Animated Film
How to Train Your Dragon 2
Best Cinematography
Daniel Landin, Under the Skin
Best Editing
James Herbert, Edge of Tomorrow

Then, we ran the awards for the best acting we’ve seen this year:

Best Supporting Actress
Jennifer Connelly, Noah
Best Supporting Actor
Robert Pattinson, The Rover
Best Actor
Guy Pearce, The Rover
Best Actress
Scarlett Johansson, Under the Skin
Best Ensemble
The Monuments Men

Finally, we finished out with the big awards, for writing, director, and best film overall:

Best Adapted Screenplay
Darren Aranofsky, Ari Handel, Noah
Best Original Screenplay
Joel Edgerton, David Michod, The Rover
Best Director
Jonathan Glazer, Under the Skin
Best Film
Under the Skin

So what’s the final awards tally?

6 — Under the Skin
4 — Noah
3 — The Raid 2
3 — The Rover
2 — Edge of Tomorrow
1 — How to Train Your Dragon 2
1 — The Monuments Men

You can read all my movie reviews for this and last year right here. Enjoy!

Half-Year Awards — Film Design and Technique

The midpoint of the year is a fantastic time to highlight the amazing films we’ve seen so far, many of which have passed hidden underneath the bigger event films of the summer. Let’s get on with the design portion of our Half-Year Awards:

Best Sound Design: Johnnie Burn, Under the Skin
Best Musical Score: Mica Levi, Under the Skin

Eavesdropped conversation on the downtrodden streets of Edinburgh, Scotland. The digestive system of an alien beast. Wind bending the pines. The raging ocean and the cry of a child. Feet racing through falling snow. The back of your jacket rubbing mossy bark off a fallen tree.

And Mica Levi’s score over all of it, spare, atonal, discordant, threatening and yearning, relentless yet lost, pulsing, an organic system all its own, a sound that exists before you walk into the theater and stays with you long after you walk out. She may even hijack the movie’s conclusion through a shift in musical cue, perhaps one of the most important musical moments since Jaws.

How do you portray the remorseless sociopathy of a rapist in music? How do you communicate the aching you feel in your chest on witnessing the beauty of nature, the hard stone in your stomach on spying its unfeeling violence? This is the score you’ve felt in your bones when you look at the dark woods under a bruised sky and feel like all the menacing possibilities of your imagination lurk in those shadows. This is the soundtrack you’ve felt all your life when chills run up your spine. Mica Levi gives our most basic impulses and fears notes to play by.

Best Art Direction: The Raid 2

This could just as easily be The Monuments Men, but The Raid 2‘s production design isn’t quite as piecemeal; it comes together to form a more cogent whole with its other elements. The Indonesian film’s red-walled dining hall is straight out of a Kubrick film, its vibrant night clubs would feel at home in a Nicholas Winding Refn piece, and its snow-draped alleys speak to Zhang Yimou’s influence on martial arts production design. To design a movie at once gangster, drama, spy, war, and martial arts film demands an eclectic mix. To bring it all together into a whole that feels part of a singular world is nothing short of breathtaking.

Best Make-up: Kumalasari Tanara, The Raid 2

With a core cast that becomes progressively more bruised and bloodied over the course of the film, and dozens of extras sliced and diced along the way, The Raid 2 separates itself from other martial arts films by taking its technical elements the extra mile. Director Gareth Evans doesn’t want your basic henchmen, though. He wants each to have their own story, so that one man’s victory is always another’s tragedy. In this way, he crafts an incredibly bloody film that’s simultaneously anti-violence. Evans often tells these smaller stories through Tanara’s make-up design, which allows lengthy fight scenes to develop their own emotional pulse free of the choreography.

Best Stuntwork: Yayan Ruhian, Fight Choreographer;
Iko Uwais, Fight Choreographer;
Bruce Law, Stunts Coordinator, The Raid 2

There are basic rules about fight choreography that are there to keep directors from biting off more than they can chew. Director Gareth Evans breaks most of them. The more difficult the choreography, the more impractical his shot selection. Ruhian and Uwais’s choreography is presented in long, unbroken takes, much like dance choreography is. In one fight, dozens of fighters are filmed in a space so narrow that cameras barely fit. In another, 30 combatants wage war in a muddy prison yard. Choreography in thick mud is already ill-advised – shooting it with overhead crane shots that show every fighter at once is next to impossible.

A later sequence involves three fighters in a narrow hallway. Most films would cut back and forth, shooting the fight from behind one side and then shooting it from behind the other. Here, the camera is choreographed with the actors, swinging in between and under them as they fight. The fight choreography itself is already top-notch, but nothing like the intricately choreographed camerawork in The Raid 2 has ever been done before. It’s too impossible a task. Or at least, it used to be.

Best Costume Design: Michael Wilkinson, Noah

Noah wins this by default. There just haven’t been a lot of strong entries so far this year. However you feel about its story, its technical elements are brilliantly executed, and its costuming is very detailed.

Best Visual Effects: Industrial Light and Magic, Noah

Darren Aronofsky uses a number of techniques that are inherently broken or hopelessly dated in modern cinema. The quick montage. Stop-motion. Time lapse. BodyCam. Shooting in silhouette. Yet he translates all of them into his own cinematic language, and for Noah that means implementing visual effects.

It’s not just about the rock giants and the mythical Great Flood Noah depicts, it’s also about how Aronofsky uses visual effects to enhance and emulate his other cinematic techniques, to create a big-budget version of his particular views of religion and philosophy. For me, visual effects aren’t just about fidelity, but also about how they are used, and few films use visual effects so effectively and experimentally as Noah does.

Best 3-D: Edge of Tomorrow

Like it or not, 3-D is here to stay. It’s unlikely it will ever overwhelm 2-D film – people work on a visual level in too many different ways, and until we can take the burden off the human eye and put it on the technology itself (read: a big step forward in holographic tech), 3-D will remain too uncomfortable and unhealthy for too many people.

That said, it can be fun for some. In terms of 3-D, no film takes full advantage of it this year quite like Edge of Tomorrow does. Is it as revolutionary as Gravity? No, and we’re not going to see 3-D used as well as Gravity used it every year. But there were moments when I’d move a hand to wipe incoming debris from my eye only for my brain to check myself and remind me it was only in the film. That’s the measure of 3-D for me – how well can it trigger kneejerk physical responses in ways that 2-D can’t. Edge of Tomorrow wins that comparison handily.

Best Animated Film: How to Train Your Dragon 2

I look for an animated film not just to be beautiful, but to communicate meaningful themes to adults and children alike. How to Train Your Dragon 2 has a lot to say about growing up, trusting oneself, and taking responsibility, but most big-budget computer animated movies do that. What puts it in a class all its own is what it has to say about betrayal and forgiveness, about divorce, about death and loss.

Combine this with its bright color palette and phenomenal mythic imagery that speak to legendary cinematographer Roger Deakins’ consultancy on the film, and – despite being a cameraless film – you have no idea how tempted I was to suggest How to Train Your Dragon 2 for this next award as well.

Best Cinematography: Daniel Landin, Under the Skin

There’s something in the cinematography of Under the Skin that’s like looking at Winslow Homer’s “Wild Geese in Flight.” In the painting, those geese are being cut down by something unseen as they fly in. Countless more are on their way. We don’t know what’s killing them. In Homer, the perpetrator is out-of-frame. In Under the Skin, the perpetrator is largely silent. In both, the artist imitates your perspective well enough to make you believe it’s your own, and so that pile of dead animals becomes a weight on your conscience. Except here, while death of nature is still the subject, it’s not geese being shot – it’s sexual assault, acts of possession and consumption.

This is fused together with an approach that highlights bright figures in dark surroundings during the film’s first half, only to switch to dark figures in frames only edged with light in its second part. In many ways, the visual approach shifts us from a documentarian beginning to a narrative end, while also reflecting the powerful predator’s burgeoning confusion as she begins to identify with her prey and their natural environment.

Best Editing: James Herbert, Edge of Tomorrow

Edge of Tomorrow is nothing particularly new. On paper, it falls into the gimmicky column that thousands of other action movies inhabit. But this is a film that lives or dies in the editing room, and I’ve rarely seen a film edited so tightly. If it were beef, it’d be 99.999% lean, and that sounds fricking delicious. So it is with Edge of Tomorrow. You’ve tasted this movie before in Aliens, Predator, Terminator, (oddly enough) Groundhog Day, and Saving Private Ryan flavors. But Edge of Tomorrow does it all so well that it ceases to matter – it puts its own stamp on things and it does it through editing.

Moreover, it’s a throwback breed of action movie that’s not all that heavy on action – visual effects used to cost tons of money, and that meant you had to have a lot of character. While Edge of Tomorrow isn’t short on visual effects, it harkens back to the days when an action movie’s intensity relied on caring about its characters first and foremost, and the action was secondary. I’m glad I caught this in the theater, and I intend to watch the crap out of this movie once it’s streaming. I highly recommend you do the same.

I’ll publish my choices for Half-Year Awards in acting tomorrow, and for screenplay, director, and film on Thursday.

Coward in the Crucible of Battle — “Edge of Tomorrow”

I kept trying to come up with what movie Edge of Tomorrow feels like. Its beach-landing scenes evoke the D-Day of Saving Private Ryan. Its aliens remind you of the squidlike robots in The Matrix, though they hunt more like the evolving machines in Screamers. Its version of mechanized infantry keeps the banter of Aliens but trades in the oversized guns for mechanical suits that seem like a redux of the clunky, earliest version of Iron Man.

It’s not a knock on Edge of Tomorrow to say it’s reminiscent of so many other movies. The more familiar we are with the basics, the more Edge can get on with the story. Aliens have crash-landed on Earth, as they are often wont to do. Tom Cruise plays William Cage, an advertising exec who’s commissioned into the army because he’s so gosh darn charming in front of cameras and the Army needs to sell a war. He’s never seen a real fight, though. In the very first scene, he’s told that he’ll be embedded with the troops in a major assault. Cage’s response? To beg, cajole, and eventually blackmail his way out of seeing combat. This is not your typical Cruise character – Cage is a coward when we meet him.

He finds himself shipped to the front anyway. It’s a disaster – the army is crushed and Cage knows so little about his mechanized armor that he spends most of the battle figuring out how to take the safety off his weapons. He is killed, and wakes up at the beginning of the previous day. He’s hijacked the alien’s ability to rewind time – key to their predicting humanity’s every move. Now, every time Cage dies, he restarts the day before the battle.

Cage tries to convince others of this, and the extent to which his commanding officers (especially an off-kilter Sergeant played by Bill Paxton) find ways to shut him up is one of the movie’s many sources of humor. So is Cruise’s trial-and-error approach to escaping his unit and tracking down Rita Vrataski (Emily Blunt), a legendary soldier who once endured a time loop similar to Cage’s. No one else will believe the two of them, so she takes it upon herself to brutally train Cage. If she breaks him, she shoots him and resets the day, Cage taking his accumulated knowledge into every next attempt. That beach invasion stops looking like an invasion and becomes an elegant choreography – Cage learns every step and move Rita and he must take to survive.

Director Doug Liman has made some solid films, The Bourne Identity and Mr. and Mrs. Smith chief among them. He’s always been great at beginnings, and he knows how to tell an ending, but he’s never had any idea what to do with a movie’s middle, when the characters have to talk to each other. It’s a perfect fit here. Edge has no middle, just countless beginnings. Cage makes attempts to get to know Rita – after hundreds of the same day relived, he’s desperate for a human connection – but for her, it’s always the first time they’ve met, and there just isn’t the time for chit-chat. It’s refreshing to see Cruise as a needy coward who must become more out of desperation, while Blunt gets to play the calculated, relentless warrior.

As an action movie, Edge is neck-and-neck with the Captain America sequel as this year’s best. It doesn’t hold as much meaning as the superhero film, but it has an old-fashioned mentality for adventure storytelling – it puts enough puzzles and meaningful obstacles in our heroes’ way that the action isn’t just our reward, but theirs, too.

This is also the best use of 3-D this year. 3-D has been killing movie experiences lately. Maleficent was blurry and motion sick. The 300 sequel was hazy and blearily lit. Good as the movie was, the shallow focus cinematography of the latest X-Men strained eyes. Directors are still learning how to implement 3-D well. Not all movies are worth the extra price of admission for it, which is why I always highlight its use.

It’s clear Liman made the commitment to pre-plan and choreograph his 3-D ahead of time. It’s striking how crisp and natural the 3-D in Edge of Tomorrow is. When shrapnel and dirt flew toward the camera, I blinked as if expecting to find something in my eye. Even dialogue scenes make you feel as if you’re a fly on the wall. It’s one of the few movies this year that absolutely demands to be seen in the theater.

Edge of Tomorrow is rated PG-13 for violence and language.

Lois Lowry, Monsters, and Sex: The Films of 2014, #20-11

20. Godzilla

May 16 — America in the ’50s made monster movies so that we could demonstrate how capable we were at overcoming anything and everything (hint, hint Russia). It was patriotic jingoism and boasting. Japan was coming off a much different experience. A longstanding tradition of creating demons was translated into an oversize, culture-wide god of vengeance meant to punish a country that was possessed by national shame for its actions in World War 2. In the beginning, before Godzilla became the 28-film, constantly reincarnated, Japanese James Bond, he wasn’t just a monster – he was a judgment.

Being big and eating trains and making noise didn’t make him terrifying. There was an underlying, creeping sense that no one in particular had earned his wrath, and so no one in particular could beat him. An entire culture had earned him through the hubris of imperialism and turning a blind eye to the actions of their own country. An entire culture could only avoid his wrath again by changing its values.

Now is a unique point in time for the American psyche to have a monster that reflects that, but it’s what director Gareth Edwards has stated he wants to do. How you translate that sense of fear and responsibility for Godzilla…that’s achievable. How you translate a national sense of shame…well, we’re not a culture that considers shame a valuable emotion. The most overwhelming component of Japanese film in the ’50s was a shame so deep that penance was more often an unattainable pursuit than an achievable goal. Reaching it could only be measured in lifetimes. If you can get that across to a Western audience in a blockbuster film, let alone a Western monster movie, then you’ve stayed true to the original 1954 film. Watch the trailer here.

Good luck, Godzilla. We could use you at a time like this.

19. Omar

February 21 — Palestine’s second Oscar nominee concerns a Palestinian freedom fighter coerced into becoming an Israeli informant. The academic side of me is fascinated with the last decade’s evolution of the Thai and Indonesian film industries, and wonders which culture will be next to dive headfirst into the medium. Palestine’s has as much to say as any culture out there. The humanitarian part of me, that had years-long access to a Native American library and its historical records as a kid (and is likely to piss off a few friends by saying this), thinks those 1.7 million Palestinians who were kicked off their land shouldn’t be forced to live in a guarded, walled ghetto. Watch the trailer here.

18. The Hobbit: There and Back Again

December 17 — If the first Hobbit was an episodic road picture centered on its characters and the second was fantasy tourism focused on its locations, what will the third one be? Based on the book and how many loose threads there are to tie up, I’m guessing it’s the action movie of the bunch. That’s good and bad. I’m a sucker for swordplay, but no matter how good the action, nothing holds up to that scenery. I really wouldn’t mind seeing Bilbo and his entourage go on another hike or two instead, or stop off to enjoy a pint in some tucked-away pub. How much to get Anthony Bourdain to Middle-earth?

17. The Guest

No date set — I don’t like slashers. The scares are too simplistic. Horror works best when it operates by its own logic. “Crazy murderer is crazy” isn’t logic; it’s an excuse. You’re Next was easily the best horror movie of 2013. It was also the most intelligent slasher I’ve seen, by turns darkly comedic and plotted with character-driven cross-purposes. It could’ve made a stage play. The Guest is Adam Wingard’s follow-up in a year that looks to be sorely lacking in good horror. Wingard’s only made one film, but already I’m a loyal fan.

16. The Hunger Games: Mockingjay – Part One

The Hunger Games still retains a certain campiness in how certain plot points are achieved, but it has something important and crucial to say about how we live our lives today. I’ve heard bad things about the last book, on which this year’s entry into the franchise is based, but based on Francis Lawrence’s direction and Jennifer Lawrence’s monumental performance in Catching Fire, I have more than enough faith in this cast and crew to keep the odds in its favor.

15. Wish I Was Here

September — Despite the Kickstarter controversy Zach Braff underwent to fund this, the early word out of Sundance is that it’s a masterpiece. I haven’t revisited Scrubs or Garden State in years, and I’m very curious as to whether they were artifacts of my early twenties or if they’d hold up just as well today. I’m a little afraid to see which, but I’m hoping Braff is still only getting started as a storyteller.

14. The Giver

August 15 — The United States is a bit like the city in Logan’s Run, except once you reach a certain age you aren’t disintegrated. Instead, you’re made to read Lois Lowry’s The Giver. It’s a much more humane approach. Considered one of those novels that’s impossible to adapt into film, I couldn’t think of a better director to try anyway. Phillip Noyce (Rabbit-Proof Fence, The Quiet American) puts character first, damn everything else, and with Jeff Bridges starring as the titular Giver, keeper of a dystopian society’s memories, and Meryl Streep as the Chief Elder, I have an incredible amount of hope for this film.

13. Edge of Tomorrow

June 6 — Tom Cruise has always had a good head for science-fiction projects: Minority Report, War of the Worlds, and one of my top 5 films of 2013, Oblivion. This last featured a small cast and the kind of plot you’d find in the ’70s era of literary science-fiction. I don’t know that director Doug Liman  (Mr. and Mrs. Smith) is capable of as fresh a perspective on the genre as Oblivion‘s Joseph Kosinski, but Edge of Tomorrow is based on the [much better titled] Japanese novel All You Need is Kill and adapted by Christopher McQuarrie, who also wrote The Usual Suspects. The trailer and its “Live, Die, Repeat” motif shows that Groundhog Day would not have been as much fun if Bill Murray were repeating D-Day against aliens instead of a day in the suburbs. It’s striking, and Emily Blunt’s turn as Cruise’s anchor-in-time is one of the roles I anticipate most in 2014. Watch the trailer here.

12. Nymphomaniac: Volumes 1 and 2

March 21 & April 18 — The capstone to Lars Von Trier’s “Trilogy of Depression,” that started with “Antichrist” and continued with “Melancholia.” While he’s no stranger to controversy, Von Trier doesn’t make films just for the argument. He’s made triumphs and messes, but his movies are always full of ideas. Nymphomaniac is an epistolary film in which two people (Charlotte Gainsbourg & Stellan Skarsgard) recount their past intimate encounters. Already referred to as FILTH by more people than have had a chance to see it, it may be just that, or it may be yet be an artful and important portal into two characters’ loneliness and egoism.

11. Only Lovers Left Alive

April 11 — Tom Hiddleston plays Loki in the Thor movies. Here, he’s an underground vampire rocker named Adam. Tilda Swinton is an indie darling who played the White Witch, the best bit in the Narnia films. Here, she’s Adam’s vampire lover of the past several centuries, Eve. Mia Wasikowska was Alice in Tim Burton’s unfortunate adaptation of Alice in Wonderland. She’s been paying penance by doing far more interesting movies ever since. She’s Eve’s little sister, Ava, and provides the trouble between the other two. Jim Jarmusch is a director who makes deeply personal films about reclusive characters. This looks like his best. Watch the trailer here.